As the title says.
I know Chicago had similar issues with white flight/suburbanisation/white no-go areas, but St Louis has failed even more than that...
It's surprisingly hard to find articles explaining exactly what the fuck happened. Is it just a combination of white flight/de-industrialisation and really fucking poor governance/forward planning..? I honestly don't understand how at least the majority white parts have still continued to decline as they have...
We don't have cities like this, in this part of the world. Frankly, I don't think many cities like this exist (where population has declined more than 60%, since 1950!!), outside North America, so it's an interesting test case.
It reads like a failed state. I guess, in a sense, it is. But how the fuck has it done worse than Detroit..?
St Louis's problem is the reputation of East St Louis.
If we just focus on East St Louis...
The interstates caused property values to tank. Dropping tax income caused budget cuts, driving the fire department to go on strike.
Dissatisfied with the police and fire situation, many large employers petitioned the state to let them secede from the city and negotiate police and fire services directly from St Clair County, further deepening the city's tax problems, causing maintenance deferral to spread into basic infrastructure maintenance.
Are you talking about it's decline in the 20th century? I'd point to the rise of airlines and interstates and the death of rail traffic.
I don't know that it's declined any more so than other cities since. I've been there a few times in the last five years and it's not bad if you don't go seek out the crazy. All big cities are infested with wokeism, including cities with big growth cities like Houston for example
The population of the city proper has declined by the statistic I mentioned, but apparently even the metro population is dropping…
Highest crime levels in the US (for a city, anyway). You get my drift…
It’s clearly very sick, even if it doesn’t look so…
It’s not wokeism that I was poking at specifically. It’s the collapse in population, industry, infrastructure and economy…
It doesn’t seem to have turned that around.
Though apparently the black areas (“North City”) are largely emptying out, so I guess that could make for an interesting future, in that sense…
Gentrification and all.
I couldn’t find that stat anywhere but I’m not going to claim I looked very hard. I think the other poster is right, it’s very much split up from good areas and total no-go ghettos. That’s not a lot different than where I grew up, so maybe it just felt normal to me. Memphis seems way worse to think of one example.
All the American cities end up with the black locust effect where they come in and destroy until run out by gentrification where they then move to destroy something else.
But I’d point to St. Louis industrial decline to be directly attached to the decline and automation of the railroads. Starting with my granddads on both sides, my family goes back as three generations of railroad workers. Decent lower middle class jobs for the most part. Most of their jobs don’t even exist today, and if you look at small towns that were even more railroad dependent than St. Louis, they are massive shitholes.
Interesting about the railroads…
I didn’t really consider that effect!
But yeah, I could see that being a thing…
We have that here, too, to an extent. It’s just that the small towns are pretty much all ghost towns, and the cities pivoted to other things.
But yeah, same principle.
Sucks about that for your family though.
I remember when they gutted the railways in my home city. The impacts were pretty massive, and it had already been in decline for decades before that, so… I can only imagine.
Though in this case it wasn’t so much automation as really bad government decision-making, and deliberately shifting those jobs, and that industry, elsewhere, even within state…
Which kind of holds, too, I guess…
They all aged out of the business really. So while I guess it's not the "family business" anymore. Although it really was for a while, almost every man my grandparents generation had a railroad job. My parents generation didn't do that great really, but myself, my brother, and most of my cousins are generally doing well in something even the ones I don't like or talk to that much. So I guess it all worked out.
Is there such a thing as "good" government decision-making? Generally they should be completely uninvolved in everything.
At best, government's make the least worst decision. We are no where near the best.
Assuming they're not outright creating problems to "solve".
Hence the 'at best'.
This is more or less what happened to Oakland. It was initially an industrial center with access to a major port. There were shipyards and Chrysler had their biggest west coast factory there.
With improvements to the transportation system the town basically got bypassed. Without jobs, rents went down. The poor underclass moved in and it became a ghetto and a major hub of crime activity with at least two major gangs operating out of Oakland. Notably the Hell's Angels paid a chemical engineer to invent an efficent process to make amphetamines.
I absolutely hate dealing with Memphis and the times I was there I didn't even feel safe in broad day-light. And I've spent a lot of time in a city that outsiders think is a crime-ridden pit. (Which, it is..in the black parts of town but road/urban-development ended up keeping those parts separate from the rest thank goodness)
Saint Louis is a city dominated by joggers, where even the white people are joggers.
Yeah, pretty much. I've been to STL a bunch of times for Cardinals games and such. I've never seen anywhere with a bigger discrepency between the good parts of town and the bad. Maybe in Central America but not by much.
The city was hit just as hard as the rest of the rust belt by de-industrialization. There just aren't any jobs anymore. Mercy Health and Anheuser Busch are the only major companies I can think of that are headquartered there and the latter doesn't really employ that many people.
Adelaide, Australia, is like this (no hqs, decline in manufacturing base, suburbanization, massive divide between “good” and “bad” areas), and yet the population hasn’t dropped yet…
Immigration rates seem fairly comparable (although the US has many more metros to choose from), but yeah… Shrinking cities are almost a uniquely American and Canadian thing, in the “developed”, non-war torn West…
The UK has regions (Wales) and a few notable examples, but nothing to quite the same extent…
It’s just odd, to me. It doesn’t seem to have quite the same problems as Detroit, Chicago, or even Minneapolis right now, and yet, its decline is proportionally much worse (well, slightly worse than Detroit, but much worse than nearly anywhere else)…
Seems strange. 🤷🏻♂️
Stl's population decline is a little misleading. You really need to look at the metro area population rather than the city itself. A lot of that decline is people moving to better suburbs like Brentwood and Clayton. I'm sure they still work in the city.
Yeah, probably true. That’s like Glasgow (although that was less voluntary, more forced), and of course many other US cities…
Makes sense. Though apparently the metro has declined too. Just to a much lesser extent.
But yeah, I guess when we measure Australian cities we usually go for the wider Metro area (it’s complicated, but sort of), so perhaps that is a fairer comparison…
Most cities counter this by annexing the suburbs to offset people voting with their feet, but St. Louis isn't allowed to - its borders as a city are fixed. So white flight is permanent, not temporary, and no amount of cash is going to drive "gentrification" when you can simply improve the suburbs you already live in.
Big think.